You're UK, We're UK

Yesterday was our first whole day in the UK. We slept in pretty late, like 11 hours. We were both pretty wiped out from traveling and I built in some tiredness so I'd be able to sleep on the plane, so there was some serious catching up to do.

We started the afternoon with a stop by a pub- Withies- for a pint. (Trivia: Pub stands for Public House). The weather was stereotypically British- gray, overcast, with the kind of miserable, annoying rain which is between a mist and a real rain- a light splattering as if someone is peeing nearby. I hate it because you feel like an umbrella is overkill but the droplets build up on your hair and clothes.

We drove on to Guildford (Trivia: Home of Ford Prefect) and found the city was packed with holiday shoppers. The parking lots near the high streets were full with up to ten cars lined up in the middle of the street waiting to get in. Tons of pedestrians everywhere. We ended up parking a short distance from the base of the high street, and hiked it in.

Guildford has two main shopping streets which run parallel to each other, and are connected by narrow pedestrian passages lined with more shops. Lots of people out and about. Sales in all the stores. Even with sales, the prices in the shops were still ridiculously expensive. First, the exchange rate is you basically multiply British Pounds by 1.5 to get USD, so there's that built-in expense. And then, there's the overall higher prices of the UK. Looking at the prices of even heavily discounted cashmere, its no wonder that we saw so many internationals flocking to Orlando's outlet malls.

After we threaded our way back and forth between both streets, we stopped for another drink and then went on to dinner at an Italian place. It's kind of amazing for me to stop and think about the age of the buildings over here. I mean, everything is relative. In Phoenix, Arizona, if a building is 100 years old, it's a museum or protected as a historic site and there's usually a giant bronze plaque. In St.Louis, that age gets pushed back by about 50-100 additional years. In the UK, those are the buildings that get the Walgreens put into them. Old for England is at least 300+ years old. We were in a pub yesterday that went back to 1700. The oldest pubs in England are over 500 years old.

The other thing that is kind of strange for me is that the ethnic food places are usually staffed by ethnic people. So the Italian restaurant is staffed by Italians. It shouldn't be weird, but for most of my life, Italian is so American, it never seemed out of place that at Delhi Palace I'd be served by Amit Gupta, but at the Zio's Cuchina It'd be Peter Schwartz. And when the waiters say "grazie" I can't help but think of the SNL sketch with Adam Sandler and Dana Carvey as the Italian restaurant pepper boys. ("Fresh-a-pepper?") Anyway, my sausage and mushroom risotto was pretty good, and the tiramisu was quite good.

Drove home through more fog and mist in the darkness.
London is actually quite far north, so it gets dark around 4pm here. For sake of comparison, the UK is situated on a latitude north of Maine, and London is only 300 miles south of Moscow. The US is a very southern country in comparison with the rest of Europe.

Played the card game daihimen (Japan) for about three hours when we got back to the house in the village. It's a really good game. (AKA President, Scum, Asshole (US), Plow the Big Two (China)).